Classic Warrior Tank Gear and Best in Slot

Last updated on Dec 05, 2020 at 16:11 by Seksixeny 37 comments

On this page, you will find the best PvE gear and best in slot items for your Warrior Tank in WoW Classic.

If you were looking for TBC Classic content, please refer to our TBC Classic Protection Warrior gear and best in slot.

1.

Gearing Strategy for Tank Warriors

While a clear best in slot list is always available in WoW Classic, the items contained might be extremely hard or expensive to get. Depending on your race, you might want different items as well, as swords or maces are more powerful for Humans, due to Sword Specialization Icon Sword Specialization and Mace Specialization Icon Mace Specialization, and axes are more powerful for Orcs, due to Axe Specialization Icon Axe Specialization.

Thus, we will try to give at least one alternative, for most slots in the list, so that you can pick where and how to farm them.

2.

Season of Mastery Lists

As WoW Classic's Season of Mastery consists of Phases that are separate from the regular branch of Classic, we have created unique gear lists for its pre-raid and Phases. In addition, you may find it useful to look over our Fire Resistance Gear guide for your specialization, which is applicable for either version of Classic.

3.

Tank Warrior Pre-Raid Best in Slot (BiS) List

In order to get ready for raiding, it is recommended that you follow this guide in order to learn which gear to gather for maximizing your threat output and survivability before raid gear is accounted for. Even so, expect to get a few pieces that you will have a hard time replacing, such as Diamond Flask Icon Diamond Flask and Hand of Justice Icon Hand of Justice.

4.

Naxxramas Tank Warrior BiS

The final challenge of WoW Classic, Naxxramas has both the meanest bosses and the juiciest loot in the game.

This loot includes the Warrior Tier 3, Dreadnaught's Battlegear. This is a defensive tank's dream set, and we will be listing many of its pieces down below. All of its bonuses are useful, as you can see below:

  • 2 piece bonus: Increases the damage done by your Revenge Icon Revenge ability by 75.
  • 4 piece bonus: Improves your chance to hit with Taunt Icon Taunt and Challenging Shout Icon Challenging Shout by 5%.
  • 6 piece bonus: Improves your chance to hit with Sunder Armor Icon Sunder Armor, Heroic Strike Icon Heroic Strike, Revenge Icon Revenge, and Shield Slam Icon Shield Slam by 5%.
  • 8 piece bonus: When your health drops below 20%, for the next 5 seconds healing spells cast on you help you to Cheat Death, increasing healing done by up to 160.

The 4 piece bonus deserves a special mention, as The Four Horsemen requires a lot of Taunt Icon Taunt swapping, and two misses in a row can easily cause a wipe.

In order to make the best use possible out of multiple long cooldown trinkets, such as Diamond Flask Icon Diamond Flask, swap them into your gear set when they are off-cooldown and replace them with others during their cooldown.

Finally, because all of Naxxramas bosses are undead other than Maexxna and Grand Widow Faerlina, items that have powerful bonuses that only work on undead such as Seal of the Dawn Icon Seal of the Dawn and Mark of the Champion Icon Mark of the Champion are a viable alternative to the BiS pieces we list below when clearing the raid.

This gear is split between defensive (D) and threat (T) options, which you can mix and match in order to make your tanking as comfortable as possible.

Slot Item Source
Helm
Neck
Shoulder
Cloak
Chest
Wrists
Gloves
Belt
  • Instructor Razuvious in Naxxramas
  • Noth the Plaguebringer, Gluth or Heigan the Unclean in Naxxramas
Legs
Boots
Rings
Trinkets
One-Hand
Shield
Ranged
5.

Other Useful Phase 6 Gear for Tank Warriors

While the list above contains the absolute best gear setup, you are unlikely to quickly gather all of it. We provide more options below, some which are very close to the best and some which are just much easier to get!

Slot Item Source
Helm
Neck
Shoulder
Cloak
Chest
Wrists
Gloves
Belt
Legs
Boots
Rings
Trinkets
One-Hand
Shield
Ranged
6.

Frost Resistance Gear for Tank Warriors

While not nearly as important for you as it is for your fellow healer and DPS raiders to use, Frost Resistance gear can still be of use when dealing with Sapphiron. Check out our recommendations below for details.

7.

Nature Resistance Gear for Tank Warriors

As a Tank Warrior, you will generally be better off using your normal high threat and high mitigation gear while tanking Princess Huhuran and Viscidus, since their normal physical attacks are just as dangerous as their poisons. It can still be useful to wear a few Nature Resistance pieces on your weakest slots, so read this guide to understand where to find such pieces!

8.

Warrior PvP Best in Slot Gear

If you would prefer to gear for PvP, you can find our Warrior PvP BiS guide below.

9.

Warrior Weapons

Since weapons are such a broad topic, we have written a full guide about Warrior weapons.

10.

Special gear for Tank Warriors

Some items, which are not powerful enough to be in the best in slot list, have special properties that make them very valuable to acquire for specific encounters or as a weapon swap mid-fight. We will list the most notable special items for the current phase, and their effects and application below:

  • Annihilator Icon Annihilator (or the less expensive, less powerful Rivenspike Icon Rivenspike and Bashguuder Icon Bashguuder) allows you to reduce an enemy's armor by up to 600 for your whole group, making it a very powerful weapon swap. Use it at the start of an encounter to quickly full debuff the boss, and then swap to your normal weapon to take advantage of the lowered armor.
  • Gnomish Battle Chicken Icon Gnomish Battle Chicken summons a chicken that attacks your enemies for 1.5 minutes, with a cooldown of 30 minutes. The chicken scales with your Engineering skill (Level 60 at 300 skill), and buffs your group with 5% increased Attack Speed through Battle Squawk. This is what makes it well worth using while grouped.
  • Arcanite Dragonling Icon Arcanite Dragonling summons a dragon that attacks your enemies for up to 1 minute, with a cooldown of one hour. The dragon scales with your Engineering skill (Level 60 at 300 skill) and causes a stacking debuff that increases Fire damage taken, which makes it worth using in later raids to boost Fire Mage damage.
  • Skull of Impending Doom Icon Skull of Impending Doom is given as a quest reward from completing Forbidden Knowledge in the Badlands. While generally undesirable, if you need to run somewhere fast, it can be a useful item to have.
  • Furbolg Medicine Pouch Icon Furbolg Medicine Pouch is sold by Gorn One Eye when you reach Honored status with Timbermaw Hold. This is a great item that you can swap during combat to provide you with a significant 1000 heal over 10 seconds. For comparison's sake, Heavy Runecloth Bandage Icon Heavy Runecloth Bandage heals you for 2000 over 8 seconds, but requires you to channel it, and you cannot take any sort of damage in the channel duration.
  • Tidal Charm Icon Tidal Charm allows you to instantly stun an enemy for 3 seconds. It has a 50% drop chance from Prince Nazjak, who spawns around 25,84 in Arathi Highlands. Due to his very high respawn timer it might be hard to get this trinket, but the stun it provides is a life saver and duel winner.
  • Linken's Boomerang Icon Linken's Boomerang allows you to potentially disarm or stun an enemy when used, which makes it useful in certain scenarios, especially in PvP. Its rewarded from the Un'Goro Crater quest It's Dangerous to Go Alone.
  • Luffa Icon Luffa removes a bleed effect, such as Garrote Icon Garrote, from yourself when used. This is great when tanking bosses with dangerous bleed debuffs such as High Priest Thekal's bleed, Speed Slash IconSpeed Slash. You get this item from the Searing Gorge quest Incendosaurs? Whateverosaur is More Like It.
  • The Alliance-only Crystal of Zin-Malor Icon Crystal of Zin-Malor allows you to kill yourself easily, and you do not get durability loss if you die from its effect. This can occasionally be useful, such as when you regret getting on a fly path after you are already flying or if you need to talk with the Blackrock Depths key ghost NPC. You get it from starting the quest Tormented By the Past.
11.

Changelog

  • 05 Dec. 2020: Adjusted some gear slots.
  • 01 Dec. 2020: Reworked the BiS guide with Naxxramas and clarity in mind.
  • 15 Nov. 2020: Added the Phase 6 best in slot list.
  • 05 Nov. 2020: Added a Frost Resistance gear list.
  • 03 Sep. 2020: Fixed a small typo with the alternative belt suggestions.
  • 30 Aug. 2020: Added Ayamiss the Hunter to the list of sources for Gauntlets of the Immovable.
  • 06 Aug. 2020: Transferred the Ahn'Qiraj gear into the main guide.
  • 27 Jul. 2020: Added a link to the Nature Resistance gear guide.
  • 20 Jul. 2020: Added AQ40 BiS gear section.
  • 19 May 2020: Added Silithus twilight boss summoning gear.
  • 16 Apr. 2020: Swapped item priority of Girdle of the Fallen Crusader and Therazane's Link.
  • 14 Apr. 2020: Updated with Zul'Gurub gear.
  • 11 Mar. 2020: Updated with Arathi Basin gear.
  • 21 Feb. 2020: Added a disclaimer on offensive gear VS defensive gear and a link to the Warrior DPS BiS page.
  • 12 Feb. 2020: Updated BiS list for Phase 3 of WoW Classic and split the guide into multiple pages.
  • 31 Jan. 2020: Reworked pre-raid BiS shoulders.
  • 28 Jan. 2020: Typo fixes and added Eskhandar's Collar.
  • 25 Jan. 2020: Added PvP reputation gear and more ranked PvP gear.
  • 23 Nov. 2019: Updated BiS list for Phase 2 of WoW Classic.
  • 26 Oct. 2019: Added Bulky Iron Spaulders to the pre-raid bis list.
  • 13 Oct. 2019: Added Phase One Molten Core / Onyxia gear bis list.
  • 11 Oct. 2019: Added Dire Maul gear and reworked the pre-raid best in slot list.
  • 16 Aug. 2019: Added new special gear to the list and changed the position of this list to the bottom of the guide.
  • 21 Jul. 2019: Removed some weak gear recommendations to make the best in slot list more accurate and easy to read.
  • 16 Jul. 2019: Updated some gear recommendations.
  • 12 Jun. 2019: Page added.
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